At the just-concluded Anheuser-Busch distributor convention, their new top marketing guy joined the CEO in bragging about the online views Budweiser's puppy and Bud Light's "up for whatever" SuperBowl commercials generated. Over 60 million in all. And then, given the brewer's continuing largely lackluster brand trends, he pleaded for patience from the audience.

So, how long will it take before Budweiser's social-media clicking turns into bar-call making?

Based on the evidence, probably never.

Not long after the SuperBowl, the monitoring service, BrandIndex, documented precisely what the Budweiser puppy ad achieved. And more important, what it failed to achieve. We printed their data then, and we re-print it here. (Perhaps the Bud guys missed it.)

To be sure, the level of "buzz" was historic.

But all that buzz was generated by, and centered on, the entertainment value of the ad. As the chart below demonstrates, none of it increased purchase-interest.

﻿Bragging about buzz that results in no positive influence on the business? Most distributors I know are too sharp to fall for it.

How craft beers convert buzz into biz.

The primary communications medium behind the remarkable growth of the vast majority of craft beers is social-- online and mobile. The emerging craft brewers couldn't afford to spend a cent on the expensive media Big Beer dominates. So, they developed their own powerful, and far cheaper, social-media expertise. How? They discovered and exploited the distinction between the social medium, and the social message.

It's simple, but profound: The beer comes first in nearly all the craft-beer buzz. Unlike Budweiser, there are no puppies, no Arnold Schwarzenegger ping-pong. Virtually all craft-beer social marketing centers on facts about the beer: how it's made, where it's available and featured, how it tastes. The beer is the entertainment.

Sample craft-beer social-media buzz focuses on... the beer.

Unless and until Big Beer figures out how to capture interesting, appealing, and compelling facts about their beer in a social-media context, we can all-- distributors included-- expect more attempts at entertainment... and more sales disappointments.

The A﻿utho﻿r

Dan Fox is a real beer guy.

For more than half his 30-year career at ad agency, Foote, Cone & Belding, he ran the Coors Brewing account. Leading a group of dozens of advertising professionals, Dan also personally wrote the Pete Coors "Somewhere near Golden, Colorado" commercials, designed the Coors NASCAR graphics, authored sales-convention speeches, and most important of all, formulated marketing strategy for virtually every Coors brand, including Coors Light, Keystone, Killian's Irish Red and more. His proudest achievement? "Our team had every Coors brand growing at once."

Upset with what he sees as the accelerating, but avoidable decline of virtually every major beer brand in the country, he set aside the hyper-competitive ethic of the beer business to campaign on behalf of the fortunes of all big-beer brands, by way of this blog. If craft brewers find his hints helpful, too, so much the better.